Now Available: The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium

I am pleased to announce that The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality, edited by Christopher Vaccaro, has been published and is now available for ordering. I am also very happy to see that my essay in this book (“Frodo’s Body: Liminality and the Experience of War”) is in such great company! See the table of contents below.

About the book: (from the publisher’s website).
The timely collection of essays is thematically unified around the subject of corporeality. Its theoretical underpinnings emerge out of feminist, foucauldian, patristic and queer hermeneutics. The book is organized into categories specific to transformation, spirit versus body, discourse, and source material. More than one essay focuses on female bodies and on the monstrous or evil body. While Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is central to most analyses, authors also cover The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and material in The History of Middle-earth.

Contents:

Introduction. Christopher Vaccaro.

Part I. The Transformation of the Body
Verlyn Flieger, “The Body in Question: The Unhealed Wounds of Frodo Baggins”
Yvette Kisor, “Incorporeality and Transformation in The Lord of the Rings”
Anna Smol, “Frodo’s Body: Liminality and the Experience of War”

Part II. The Body and the Spirit
Matthew Dickerson, “The Hroa and Fea of Middle-earth: Health, Ecology and the War”
Jolanta N. Komornicka, “The Ugly Elf: Orc Bodies, Perversion, and Redemption in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings”

Part III. The Discursive Body
Robin Anne Reid, “Light (noun, 1) or Light (adjective, 14b)? Female Bodies and Femininities in The Lord of the Rings”
Gergely Nagy, “A Body of Myth: Representing Sauron in The Lord of the Rings”

Part IV. The Body and the Source Material
James T. Williamson, “Emblematic Bodies: Tolkien and the Depiction of Female Physical Presence”
Jennifer Culver, “Extending the Reach of the Invisible Hand: A Gift Looks for Gain in the Gifting Economy of Middle-earth”
Christopher Vaccaro, “Tolkien’s Whimsical Mode: Physicalities in The Hobbit”